Google to lay new undersea cable routes between US and India: CEO Sundar Pichai
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, will house a gigawatt-scale compute facility and an international subsea cable gateway.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai arrived at India's AI Impact Summit 2026 with a slate of announcements, pledging expanded subsea cable routes, new skilling programmes, and a deepened government partnership on artificial intelligence.
Pichai said the recently announced $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, will house a gigawatt-scale compute facility and an international subsea cable gateway. The skilling commitments include training 20 million public servants and supporting 11 million students across India.
“Today, we are announcing the India-America connect initiative, which will deliver new subsea cable routes to increase AI connectivity between the US-India and multiple locations across the southern hemisphere,” Pichai said.
On skilling, Pichai announced a Google AI Professional Certificate Programme, to be offered in English and Hindi, with additional Indian languages to follow. "We are partnering with Wadhwani AI to reach students and early career professionals," he said.
He also disclosed a partnership with Karma Yogi Bharat to support India's civil service, saying Google Cloud would provide "a secure infrastructure for a platform supporting more than 20 million public servants across 800 districts and in 18 Indian languages."
The CEO of Google also announced "a new $30 million Google.org AI for Science Impact Challenge to support researchers globally using AI to drive the next generation of scientific breakthroughs."
The tech giant will also partner with Atal Tinkering Labs to bring "Gen AI assistance to over 10,000 Indian schools and 11 million students with a focus on robotics and coding in the classroom."
The Alphabet CEO also said that India is on course to become a major force in AI, telling an audience at the India AI Summit that the country has the potential to be a user, builder, and rule-shaper simultaneously.
"I believe India is going to have an extraordinary trajectory with AI, and we want to be a partner," Pichai said, drawing on his childhood in Chennai to describe a country he said he has watched undergo an "incredible transformation."
Pichai framed AI as a once-in-a-generation shift. "AI is the biggest platform shift of our lifetimes, and one of the most powerful tools to solve problems and improve lives at a planetary scale," he said, pointing to applications in disease prediction, community resilience, and accessible learning as areas where the technology could deliver the most impact.
Edited by Suman Singh